Okay, guys. Take it from a (real) MD. What is the first thing that goes on your wrist when you enter a hospital, or even an ER? A .... wait for it... bracelet. But all it does is identify you to avoid medication and lab errors. It's a dumb hospital bracelet.
In the ICU there are complicated, bulky, uncomfortable and expensive machines that take your blood pressure every 2 minutes, (or with a catheter inside an artery, continuously). Monitors attached by leads to your chest read out your pulse, but not only a number-- a waveform that has meaning on its own. There is a continuous oxygen saturation monitor on your fingertip or sometimes toe. To get your blood sugar, though, a nurse still has to show up with a nasty lancet-containing machine and a hand held device that gives a digital readout. And temperatures are still taken only every few hours. Electrolytes might be checked daily by a phlebotomist who shows up at 5 AM so that your readings are ready by 7 or 8 for the doc, slightly more frequently if you are critically ill.
On the medical and surgical wards themselves, much of this data is collected only every 8 hours, by nursing personnel that go from bed to bed the old fashioned way. Good luck with that if you take a sudden turn for the worse and it takes someone 8 hours to figure it out.
Does all this sound like an expensive, uncomfortable and often inadequate system to do something that Apple likely can do --with a small, elegant, reliable system that will read out the essential parameters continuously, to a central monitoring desk that will alarm when abnormal conditions occur, allowing prompt intervention and racking up the lives saved? Yeah, to me too.
We've been waiting for a while for the smart hospital bracelet. I think we know where it's coming from .
From Steve's sister's eulogy:
"Intubated, when he couldn’t talk, he asked for a notepad. He sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed. He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit. And every time his wife walked into the room, I watched his smile remake itself on his face.
For the really big, big things, you have to trust me, he wrote on his sketchpad. He looked up. You have to."
I'm ready to trust Steve and the company he left behind to change the world. I always have been.
Iphoneloca, I like the sound of it. Current medical devices are expensive, bulky and sometimes inconvenience (requires manual operation periodically for example). What Apple can, and I believe they do, create a smart device that is much more personal, less expensive, unobtrusively small and automatically gathering hospital-grade accuracy data such as temp, heart-rate, blood-sugar, etc. even when the patient is not at hospital and send the data "securely" to the assigned doctor. This will be certainly a problem-solving device but that incorporate technology in a really subtle, unobtrusive way.
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In the ICU there are complicated, bulky, uncomfortable and expensive machines that take your blood pressure every 2 minutes, (or with a catheter inside an artery, continuously). Monitors attached by leads to your chest read out your pulse, but not only a number-- a waveform that has meaning on its own. There is a continuous oxygen saturation monitor on your fingertip or sometimes toe. To get your blood sugar, though, a nurse still has to show up with a nasty lancet-containing machine and a hand held device that gives a digital readout. And temperatures are still taken only every few hours. Electrolytes might be checked daily by a phlebotomist who shows up at 5 AM so that your readings are ready by 7 or 8 for the doc, slightly more frequently if you are critically ill.
On the medical and surgical wards themselves, much of this data is collected only every 8 hours, by nursing personnel that go from bed to bed the old fashioned way. Good luck with that if you take a sudden turn for the worse and it takes someone 8 hours to figure it out.
Does all this sound like an expensive, uncomfortable and often inadequate system to do something that Apple likely can do --with a small, elegant, reliable system that will read out the essential parameters continuously, to a central monitoring desk that will alarm when abnormal conditions occur, allowing prompt intervention and racking up the lives saved? Yeah, to me too.
We've been waiting for a while for the smart hospital bracelet. I think we know where it's coming from .
From Steve's sister's eulogy:
"Intubated, when he couldn’t talk, he asked for a notepad. He sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed. He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment. He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit. And every time his wife walked into the room, I watched his smile remake itself on his face.
For the really big, big things, you have to trust me, he wrote on his sketchpad. He looked up. You have to."
I'm ready to trust Steve and the company he left behind to change the world. I always have been.